For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.
Interpretation
Love is a constant presence that is deepened by the awareness of mortality.
In this quote, Gabriel Garcia Marquez reflects on the nature of love and its enduring quality. He suggests that while love exists anytime and anywhere, its significance and strength are amplified when it is contrasted with the proximity of death, highlighting how mortality brings a deeper appreciation of relationships and emotions.
In practice
In a wedding speech, one might reference this quote to emphasize the enduring nature of love.
He said that people who loved [animals] to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ.
Amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was.
She had the revelation one Sunday that while the other instruments played for everyone the violen played for her alone .
He sank into the rocking chair, the same one in which Rebecca had sat during the early days of the house to give embroidery lessons, and in which Amaranta had played Chinese checkers with Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, and in which Amarana Ursula had sewn the tiny clothing for the child, and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past.
Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry.
Both described at the same time how it was always March there and always Monday, and then they understood that José Arcadio Buendía was not as crazy as the family said, but that he was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the truth of the fact that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room.
It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.
Their silence comfortable. Something unfolding. But what? Not love, which wrenched and wounded. Not love, which came only once.
Oh to have you with me, to have you here, not to be alone, but to be with you, my beauty, you of all souls! You.
My parents always looked like they loved being together. That's what I took from them, and that's how my wife and I are. I still feel like we're dating.
O love, O fire! once he drew With one long kiss my whole soul through My lips, as sunlight drinketh dew.
True love is when both people think they have the better half of the deal.
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